Using one exercise to practice a multitude of techniques

Byzantine, Arabic or double harmonic scale

I quite like doing exercises - there is a certain meditative quality to working on an individual skill repeatedly to get it exactly right.   And finally nailing an exercise is nice because I can more predictably repeat it than I can with pieces (where skills that I thought were nailed disappear into the ether on a regular basis).  However I'm much more likely to stick with an exercise if there is a reason for working on it, like it's a component of  a piece I'm working on.  For instance, in my long- sidelined VL4 prelude, I'm practicing the moving arpeggios by just fretting the bass note, which essentially turns it into a single string exercise for the left hand.   Now just repeating this over and over is kind of boring, and knowing me I will eventually 'forget' to practice it if it's too boring.

But, then I started to think about all the things I could practice while working on the LH movement - first of course, was learning the LH pattern. Then I figured I could practice the LH movement by doing scales on a single string - why not? And review modes while I was at it - E major, plus Lydian and Mixolydian because they are based on the major scale.   Natural minor and harmonic and melodic minors plus Phrygian, Dorian, and at a pinch Locrian, because they are based on the natural minor scale.   At least that's the way I think of them.  There's a nice description here.  I never could come to grips with modes by 'starting on a different scale degree.' Although I understood the theory, translating it to the guitar was a bit like the relationship between understanding that german verbs go at the end of the sentence and speaking fluent german. And besides which, I could never remember the order they come in (essential to knowing which scale degree to start on).   I'm not the only one - I know someone who finally figured out modes when they were able to relate them to pentatonic scales (see a description here), although this definitely wouldn't work for me because I don't know my pentatonic scales...yet ( I guess I could practice them on a single string!)   However I have internalized the intervals in major  (WWHWWWH) and  minor (WHWWHWW) scales so on a single string it's pretty easy to take a major scale and raise the 4th (Lydian) or lower the 7th (Mixolydian) for example, cos I can count up to 7. 😊   Maybe I'll eventually recognize them by ear - I live in hope.
For the RH I could emphasize different fingers, which might be useful because the bass note needs to be brought out for the melody and currently I'm losing the other notes when I do that.  And of course dynamics pertinent to the piece.

Hopefully making it interesting, and relevant to a current piece will make me stick with it long enough to make progress, and as a bonus I might finally learn that weirdly compelling byzantine scale...

Are these pieces too advanced for me?

Most of the pieces I have been given to learn, I can actually play, after a fashion.  I am fortunate in that I get excellent advice about what is within my capabilities, and what I should put aside because it wouldn't turn out well.  Why, in that case, was I given a few pieces that didn't make it?  I'm not talking about the pieces that I didn't care to work on because they didn't appeal to me -  those will probably be lost surreptitiously if they haven't already found the trash can.   But there are others that I really would like to be able to play - I tried,  tried some more, and at some point gave up.  And there they sit giving me the evil eye.  What's going on here?  Did I just not work hard enough (or smart enough) on them? Was I supposed to get something out of them despite the fact that I never reached the point of actually being able to play them?   Or perhaps they should have pushed me a bit and I should have risen to the challenge but didn't?  (Ouch).   I'm not a natural at guitar, and being older means that my hands (and brain) take longer to adapt.  But I usually rise to a challenge if it's doable, so what was the point in butting up against these pieces that turned out to be beyond my ability?

I'm reminded a bit of my skiing history.  For a number of years I used to take a womens' ski camp every year with the same instructor.   I vividly remember standing at the top of a fairly threatening black run beset with choppy snow and moguls - the same challenging slope I had struggled with the previous year.  Then the instructor gave me a single piece of advice that turned the run into a cakewalk (relatively speaking)  - eureka!  "Why didn't she tell me that before?" I asked?  She looked at me, smiled, and said - "I did - you just weren't ready to use it last year."  I shook my head - I was drawing a complete blank.  But I did have the next best thing to instant replay.   I write down stuff because I know I will forget it in the year between one ski vacation and the next.  That night I checked my notes - and there it was in black and white.  Needless to say I had to admit the fact to the ski instructor the following day.  She was right - I just wasn't ready the previous year.

So perhaps that's the purpose of those abandoned pieces - unless I challenge myself to see if I'm ready, I won't know, and neither will my instructor.   It's just a matter of trying.  Speaking of which, maybe now it's time to have another shot at that Villa Lobos prelude...😉

How do you learn a new piece?

Yippee!  Got a new piece to learn ( guess what period -hint - check the picture)  Got to admit it, I'm a sucker for new melodies - and as I set about it, I realized that the way I learn new pieces has changed.  Not so much because I was told to do it differently (and I was, repeatedly!) - more because the old way no longer works.  You might ask what was the old way?  I have to admit it: I would just pick a section and play it through over and over until it came together,  perhaps stopping to work out the LH fingering but leaving the RH more or less to chance.
However when you have to think about bass muting, adjusting fingering to make sure you can a) get to the next notes in time and b) play it fast enough and c) hold notes that are supposed to be held - this random approach just doesn't cut it (though it probably works well enough for randomizing item selection for an experiment 😉 ).


It's not that I don't read about the best methods, or listen when my teacher tells me, it's more that I'm too impatient to bother unless I really need to.  Why fix it if it is not broken, right?  I will give myself credit for remembering the advice and dredging it back up when I need it though. Mostly for this I've been recalling a miniscule book, Ricardo Iznaola 'On Practicing' , filled with succinct and useful advice, not surprisingly, on how to practice.  I should go back and look at it again - but remember what I said about being impatient?

OK so how am I currently learning a new piece?

• Identify the first phrase
• Go through it one measure at a time working out the positions/fingering (don't forget to figure out the RH!)   Write them in in pencil.
• Start at the beginning practice one measure at a time not paying too much attention to getting the rhythm right. 
• Repeat but playing in correct rhythm.  
• Work on individual transitions within the measures as necessary.
• This is the fun part -  start at the end of phrase and play the last measure. Then try to hook the previous one onto it and play both.  Then hook on the one before that, etc.
• Finally, start at the beginning, try to play through.  How fast?  as slow as needed to make the hardest transition. Use the metronome to avoid speeding up in the easier bits.
• Repeat for the next phrase
• And start adding dynamics to the part you can play.

I am in no way suggesting this is the best way to learn a piece - merely that it reflects where I am in the evolution my own learning.  In fact somewhere in the back of my head I remember my guitar teacher saying something about incorporating dynamics right from the beginning - but seriously - just don't feel the need to bother with that right now.  (I have a feeling that will come back to haunt me in future though...😏 ). 

Slow practice: so that's why it isn't working!

I'm messing up again.   Even though I can play it at home, (most of the time) I'm not managing to play it for my guitar teacher.   And then comes the instruction ... "try playing it more slowly" -  I can almost predict when.  But at home, I often do play it more slowly in an effort to make it more consistent, it's just not helping much with the faster playing - why not?

I think I may have just come across the answer in Kevin Gallagher's excellent blog at http://www.guitar69.com/   His latest post is short, to the point and may have hit the nail on the head.   He says you have not just to go slowly, but also to do things differently while you've got all that time, with a view to changing how you play it fast.  What in particular does he recommend?  You should be thinking ahead - visualizing, and even feeling how the upcoming notes are going to look and sound while you are still playing the previous ones.  As this is something I've been unable to figure out how to incorporate into my own playing it feels like it might be key. Also consciously working on playing in a relaxed manner - essential for playing faster.  

So it's back to the drawing board for another round of slow playing - this time with something to aim for 😊

The principles of effective teaching: can you use them in your own practice?

I was reviewing some teaching modules on adult learners and modern teaching theory and it struck me that maybe those of us adults who are trying to learn how to play the guitar could make use of these theories to help us learn.  After all, adult learners approach learning a little differently than children.

How so? Well, most of us are learning the guitar because we want to, not because someone else thinks it's a good idea (ie intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation).   And we like to know exactly why we should do something a particular way.  In fact my guitar teacher is probably pretty fed up with me asking him why I should bother to do it his way, rather than mine.  The fact that he's pretty much always right (at least so far as guitar stuff goes) is irrelevant: as adults just don't take kindly to being told "it's just the way it's done", and are quite likely to ignore the advice unless we can see the reason for doing it or because our way isn't working 😒  (problem based learning).   We are also likely to use many different sources of information apart from our teacher - reading around the topic, consulting web videos, guitar forums etc. as well as our own past experiences.

In short, as adults we like to be in charge of our own learning.  So we shouldn't really be surprised that self-directed learning is at the heart of modern teaching theory, and as adults we may be able to use it to help ourselves in our practice.  Even if we have a great teacher, she isn't there all the time so most of our "learning" is what we teach ourselves while we are practicing.

Where to start?  Maybe an obvious place is with Anders Ericsson's model of "deliberate practice."  Most of us are familiar with Malcolm Gladwell's now-popular concept that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to gain mastery of a particular skill,  Not just 10,000 hours, but at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.   (For the sake of our sanity, let's just ignore the fact that 10.000 hours is probably a gross underestimate for expert musicians, and most of don't have that kind of time anyway).  Which begs the question, what exactly is "deliberate practice"?  Yes it involves thinking about a problem,  trying to figure out exactly what is going wrong, and hence how we could fix it.  But is that enough for us to put it into practice for ourselves?  How would a teacher direct the process of deliberate practice?

One of the essential tenets of teaching deliberate practice is establishing concrete goals, that once reached, represent mastery over that skill.  We're not talking being able to play Concierto de Aranjuez here. Just small goals, specific problems.  So suppose the problem is missing a string every time in a particular measure perhaps after an awkward shift.  The first step is establishing the goal, i.e. making that shift at tempo in a legato manner (obviously without missing the string).  The next step is to recreate the problem, breaking things down and analyzing them with a view to coming up with potential solutions. What is happening before we miss the string?  Perhaps the arm didn't get into position because the elbow didn't move first. Perhaps it's hard to hit the string unless we pre-place the finger. Perhaps it's not something our hands can easily manage and we should think about a different fingering or position. Perhaps it's actually the right hand that's confused and causing the problem.  Most of us have been told these things multiple times in different contexts, but perhaps don't think to use them to troubleshoot on our own.  Drumroll: enter deliberate practice!  After having come up with a bunch of potential solutions, the next step is to test to see if any of them fix the problem.   If a teacher had been present, she might have short circuited the process and prescribed the solution,  reiterated the key points necessary to "get it right" (perhaps it's pre-placing the finger) then asked you to do the shift slowly with the new technique.  She might have interrupted the "wrong" technique,  instructed us to go more slowly, whatever, until the correct movement sequence was firmly established.  If we are teaching ourselves, obviously we may have to try a bunch of potential solutions and be particularly meticulous about checking we aren't falling back into the previous unsuccessful movement pattern,  but the process is essentially the same. It may take longer than if the teacher was present,  but as Lao Tse said: "If you tell me, I will listen. if you show me, I will see.  But if  you let me experience, I will learn."

Redistributing my practice time - a video !!!

I came to the conclusion the end of last year that my guitar 'hobby', although still engrossing, was become less fun.   After evaluating what I was spending my practice time doing, I observed that I was spending too much time on things that were not terribly enjoyable.  And as a pretty significant component of my happiness involves a) learning new pieces and b) getting better at playing - the lack of results in these areas was a major damper.  Nothing like data collection to shed light on things!     As a result I decided to take a break from orchestra, get material from my teacher intended to facilitate progress, and learn some new pieces.   You might think that new material from my teacher and new pieces to play are one and the same, but at my level, educational material isn't necessarily that much fun.  Accordingly I get to choose fun pieces to work on as a break from the "work" pieces and give me something new to play.

I decided to split up my practice time into one third learning "work" pieces, one third learning "fun" pieces and one third doing other stuff that catches my fancy.   How is this working out?  So far so good! 😀   I have been making progress on a couple of "work" pieces - taking them more in depth than I would normally do.  I learned my first "fun" piece (this represents a new thing for this blog - a video!   and I've had time to start relearning pieces I had forgotten,  work on a duet, and figure out how to make videos (though that still needs work ....😏 )